This year marks the 25th anniversary of John D. Huston’s one-man production of A Christmas Carol. The Winnipeg-based actor uses Dickens’ original story to tell the tale of redemption, varying his body language, demeanour and accent to portray each character. Huston’s final Ottawa show will be his 650th performance of the holiday classic. He shared his insights into it with Lynn Saxberg in an interview, which has been edited for length.

Q: Why tackle a solo version of A Christmas Carol?

A: What you see when I do it, is you see A Christmas Carol as close as I can reasonably get to how Dickens did it. I use the original script, melodrama and all, and that’s what we love: The great emotional highs and the broad, eccentric characters and the real human truths that Dickens uncovers.

Q: Dickens did one-man shows of his work?

A: Dickens was a very theatrical writer. He loved the theatre, he loved doing theatre. He toured A Christmas Carol, and a number of other pieces, for years. The last 17 years of his life, he spent a good chunk of that time on the stage doing his own one-man shows.

Q: What’s your earliest connection with the tale?

A: My father read it to us when we were children. I was four or five. I think he read it every year. We also saw, of course, Elwy Yost. Back in those days in the ’60s, he had a TV show in Winnipeg called Movie Matinee. He’d show classic movies at 4 in the afternoon, and every year he always ran the Alastair Sim A Christmas Carol in its entirety. I remember at school, before the Christmas holidays, we’d sit in hallway and they’d wheel the televisions out. It was not the first movie I saw by any means, but it’s one I remember very, very clearly.

Q: Why was it important for you to stick to the original Dickens’ version in your performance?

A: I wanted a challenge. No one else was doing it. I certainly like being able to say this is the story the way its author told it. This is what he felt was important. And this is how he did it. This isn’t like watching a movie or stage play, this is something very different, and it’s a great story. I think when you see a solo version, you get the essentials of a story everybody knows in our culture on some level. We recognize Scrooge and Tiny Tim as archetypes. If you say ‘Bah, humbug,’ everyone knows what you mean.

Q: What do you think gives it such an enduring appeal at Christmas time?

A: Family. It is the great story of a second chance. I can’t think of a better example of a story where someone is taken right to the absolute edge of disaster and has been snatched back, is given a chance to make it right. That’s immensely appealing, I think to most people. We all want a second chance at something. We’ve all messed up badly somewhere. And this story says you can make peace with that. You can, as Scrooge says, live in the past, the present and the future. You can make things right up to a point. You can then make up for those by living the rest of your life in a different way. There is a choice. Scrooge is not a young man. We’re not told how old he is, but it’s clear he’s not young. Even in late middle age, or old age, there is always that chance.

Q: Any idea why Dickens wrote it as a ghost story?

A: Dickens gave it a supernatural twist because that’s what he understood. In England, Christmas was the time you tell ghost stories. They didn’t celebrate Halloween. The time to tell ghost stories was Christmas because of winter solstice. You get this not just in Dickens, but in a lot of other literature of the time. People gathered around the fire after Christmas dinner and told spooky stories.

Q: There’s a new film about Dickens entitled The Man Who Invented Christmas. Did he?

A: No. Dickens didn’t invent Christmas, he just published the most successful book about Christmas at a time when it had reached the zeitgeist. When the Puritans came to power, the first thing they did was outlaw Christmas. It had been a huge holiday, but it wasn’t even a day off work in Dickens’ time. People went to church unless it was the middle of the week, then they would have to work. It was a regular day on the calendar. The Victorians were very interested in tradition and what their ancestors had done so they began to look at Christmas, and all of the things we recognize as Christmas started to come together. In the middle of it, Charles Dickens published this book.

Q: What was the initial reaction?

A: It was a phenomenal best seller. It was dramatized twice, six weeks after publication, in February, at a time when London had about as many people as Ottawa. It was published in 1843 and has never been out of print. It’ll be 175 years old next year. Dickens was the first celebrity, as we understand it, and so his performances were major events. They were like rock concerts and the tickets were being scalped for the equivalent of hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars. Dickens wrote other Christmas books, but none of them grabbed the popular imagination and continued to hold it.

Q: What’s your favourite character or scene?

A: I like being Dickens. I like doing the narrative between the scenes because they’re great fun and they’re never in the movies. The movies will show you something, but they don’t give you Dickens’ descriptions of something, which are quite delicious sometimes. The thing that often surprises people — because we’ve all seen the movie, but few people have read Dickens — is how funny it is. Dickens being Dickens, he puts humour in the midst of these scenes of terror and pathos and sentimentality.

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